By Luke Thomas
November 9, 2010
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signaled today he will veto legislation that aims to reduce obesity in children.
Dubbed “Healthy Food Incentives Ordinance,” the legislation requires restaurants and fast-food chains to discontinue using toys as a marketing ploy to induce children to consume unhealthy foods. Instead, the legislation mandates toys can only be used as an inducement to purchase healthy foods.
“From encouraging salad bars and exercise in our schools to allowing use of food stamps in farmers markets, no city in America has done more to educate our children and encourage families to make healthier eating choices,” stated Mayor Gavin Newsom. “We must continue to take steps to combat childhood obesity, a genuine health crisis in America, but this bill takes the wrong approach. Parents, not politicians, should decide what their children eat, especially when it comes to spending their own money. Despite its good intentions, I will veto this unwise and unprecedented governmental intrusion into parental responsibilities and private choices.”
The legislation, sponsored by Supervisor Eric Mar and co-sponsored by Supervisors John Avalos, David Campos and David Chiu, passed on final reading earlier today with 8-3 votes, a veto-proof majority. Supervisors Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd – all Newsom appointees – dissented.
The Board is expected to vote within two weeks to sustain or overturn the mayor’s veto.
Luke Thomas
Luke Thomas is a former software developer and computer consultant who proudly hails from London, England. In 2001, Thomas took a yearlong sabbatical to travel and develop a photographic portfolio. Upon his return to the US, Thomas studied photojournalism to pursue a career in journalism. In 2004, Thomas worked for several neighborhood newspapers in San Francisco before accepting a partnership agreement with the SanFranciscoSentinel.com, a news website formerly covering local, state and national politics. In September 2006, Thomas launched FogCityJournal.com. The BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, New York Times, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Weekly, among other publications and news outlets, have published his work. Thomas is a member of the Freelance Unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, TNG-CWA Local 39521 and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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November 11, 2010 at 9:02 pm
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day!” — Couldn’t have said it better!
November 11, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Newsom is right, which proves that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Eric Mar, et al, were elected Supervisors, not nannies. They apparently have forgotten that their charge is to to come up with a workable budget, act as overseers of city departments, make sure the infrastructure is maintained, etc. They were not charged with the oversight of parents and what they feed their children.
November 10, 2010 at 10:56 am
Sigh is right, Ann.
I remember the first time I ever ate at a McDonalds. A pretty cousin drove me there in her beat up pick up truck. I was amazed how the burger “materialized” without us having to be seated or having to wait: and it was wrapped like a Christmas present.
Every now and then I might visit a McDonald’s because I am just plain starving and there is nowhere else to go that I can afford. I can hardly abide the wait and the inevitable ping ponging back and forth to get forgotten napkins or to correct mistakes in the order. Is it my imagination that the gray burgers look like they were squeezed out of toothpaste tubes?
I read once that McDonalds scientists worked hard to achieve a burger that could be chewed and swallowed in under a minute, the theory being that your stomach has no time to know if it is full. The goal was to make you go back and order another burger.
The tables are usually filthy, forget the bathroom. Always, music with advertising blasts– to speed things up? I always picture the opening scene in 1984 as set in an aging McDonalds. I can see Winston Smith playing with a drippy french fry.
The quality of the franchises differ greatly depending upon their owners. I lived in Orlando, Florida a number of years. Real restaurants there do not compare to the quality of our restaurants here; I was often made sick, until I found some sound family-owned businesses. I attributed the poor quality of the meals at most places to the low wages and rapid turnover of employees I Orlando. Its McDonalds were much better though. The local monopolist was a show-off and installed huge well-maintained aquariums at each of his outlets. He hadn’t then added the napkin dispensers that could double for windshield wiping.
I often think McDonalds started out with good intentions, and the deceased widow of its founder, Ray Kroc, certainly was the source of much philanthropy. I often think that people like her, or Warren Buffett, or Bill Gates, or Ted Turner don’t understand thoroughly how their creations take on lives of their own and race ahead of their better intentions. (The same for many public-spirited politicians as well).
The whole obesity deal, like the war on smokers, amounts to low-hanging fruit for elites interested in labeling and social control. Go after society’s losers first.
Meantime, the fast food industry, and the tobacco industry continues to adapt and increase their profits with hardly a hiccup.
Corporations will outlive us all; all talk about freedom and competition in an unrestrained capitalist system like ours is nonsense.
As yet we are lucky that we weren’t born with a barcode tatooed on our forehead that predicts what we will cost and what we owe over the course of our lifetimes. I often wonder why marketers even bother to rotate price tags at the grocery. Haven’t they already predicted the bigger picture?
As Safeway (and just about everyone else including San Francisco’s public library) quietly replace live employees with Self-Serve, I wonder what would stop them from just dropping the facade that we have choices altogether.
Poor people need healthy food, and the time and facilities to cook it and eat it properly. There is something noble about the whole Slow Food Nation stuff, but that is unlikely to solve the problems of the poor. Been to our Farmer’s markets lately? They cater more and more to the better-heeled. Food Stamp chits don’t go very far.
McDonald’s raised the prices of their dollar meals out at the Haight, some say to discourage the kids that Newsoms Sit/Lie addressed.
So one can’t sit on the sidewalk, or in a McDonalds if one lacks the money. Where else to go? In a beautiful city, “human pins”, material and suggestive, are supplanting pigeon pins.
One may one day need a name tag just to walk down a street.
Sigh again. On a lighter note:
http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/2010/images/110910.gif
November 10, 2010 at 8:54 am
I’ve got a sister-in-law who probably donates half her time to cooking healthy food for kids with cancer at a charity called the Ronald McDonald House in Seattle, http://goo.gl/Cv3qp. Hard to argue against it, when there are real kids there, with real cancer, but, sigh . . .
November 9, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Something sensible.
Only a grinch would take toys from children– or fat which keeps some poor kids alive.
Now, if only we could do something about the poverty that turns Mickey D into a such a convenient surrogate parent.
Say, there’s a war on isn’t there? And an economic crisis?
http://www.nccp.org/profiles/CA_profile_7.html